Man Or Monster Developer Blog #5: Almost Ready!

It’s nearly time to unleash Man Or Monster onto Miniclip! In the last of our developer blog series, we chatted to Diederik Groesbeek about putting the finishing touches to our epic new game.

Finishing touches

“Man Or Monster is almost ready to go! We’re in the last stages of development now, which is basically fixing some final bugs and glitches, and tweaking and balancing. This is one of the most important stages – when you’ve built the game and pretty much everything in it, but then you have to make sure it’s as fun to play as you hoped.

Getting the Monster camera setup right was tricky – the Monsters are so huge, and we want players to have that sense of size when they’re playing, but not to have them blocking your view as you’re stomping around!

Finding bugs themselves is not that hard – it’s usually the small tweaks that are the trickiest. When you’re so ‘into’ the project as we have been with Man Or Monster, your brain can overlook stuff that’s incredibly obvious for new players. For example: we almost forgot to mention in the tutorial what the actual goal of the game is!

Actually, we did have one bug that we thought made the game better, so it has stayed in! When we first implemented the AI for minions (the black spider-like critters), it surprised us how spooky it was for them to just pop onto buildings and suddenly attack you. So rather than fix this, we made it part of the game.”

You wouldn’t want to find THESE in your bath.

Looking back

“We’re really happy with how Man or Monster has turned out. It has the retro style that we were aiming for, like an old 2D game come to life. At first, we had some doubts with the gameplay for the Monster, but we’ve tweaked quite a bit since then and added a few new features, so we’re glad with how it’s turned out. As for the Man part of the game, we’re proud of getting the right feature set for this mode – we think you’ll have a lot of fun no matter which side you choose!

Probably the biggest challenge was setting up the art pipeline. That, and to keep making the right decisions on which features to implement and which ones we had to pass on. During development, a lot of people got very excited about the gameplay and so between us we had a lot of ideas!”

“Of course, with big projects like this, there’s always a few things we’d have liked to have included but didn’t have chance. We thought about things like being able to control military units yourself when playing as the Man (they have their own AI in the final version), and maybe allowing the Monster to do some taunts and roars at the end of a round for bonus points! This is in addition to the obvious stuff like multiplayer and Oculus Rift support 😉

But overall, we’re delighted with what we’ve managed to pack into the game. Probably my favorite thing is watching the Monster get destroyed after you’ve deployed loads of units like jetfighters and zeppelins. The pure mayhem and chaos you can create is pretty impressive… and very satisfying.

My favorite monster is still T-Wrecks (formerly known as Bad Browser). He’s purple and looks like a guy in a monster suit, inspired by old B-movies.”

INCOMING!

Man or a Monster – Tips

“Some gameplay tips? Well, if you’re playing as the Man, the main tip is to stay clear of the Monster at all times! If you haven’t upgraded your hearts, he can kill you in a second – so hunt for those parachutes and crates as they may contain additional power-ups.

Don’t stand too close to the more valuable units you’ve placed, as sometimes the Monster throws a fireball at you which in turn will wipe out your precious units before they’ve even had chance to fire. Oh, and finally, place units in open places where they have a good line-of-sight on the Monster.

As the Monster: stock up on stuff like fireballs to destroy buildings from a distance, or give you the edge against Mammoth Tanks and Tesla Coils in the later levels. Equip the shield special attack frequently, and use the bursts to get rid of smaller units around you, like the helicopters.

Also, you might want to try the Red Rage power in combination with other special attacks like the dash, body slam or spin attack – this will do some serious damage to a block of buildings.

Save the world, or destroy it?

“If Man Or Monster was real… I’d save the world, of course! Mainly because I’d love to fly a jetpack one day.”

Man or Monster is in the final stages of development! Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to find out news of its release date. Roar!